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I'm not in favor of rat bikes!

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what I Have noticed on the west coast is !! that most bikes you would consider buying are bikes that are missing fenders racks chain guards and alot for some reason are missing head badges !

That's where all those eBay goodies come from! If someone wasn't parting out bikes there wouldn't be stripped frames lying around to make rats from.. (My Roadmaster project, while hopefully prettier than an average rat bike, started out life with me that way. )

I look at the guys on eBay with rows of chainguards and wonder... what happened to the rest of those bikes..??You can't tell me the bike shops sold the owners of those bikes new chainguards and just tossed the old ones in a pile for someone to discover twenty years down the road.....I'm thinking more like they took the junkers in on slow days and stripped the saleable and easliy removed parts off them before tossing the rest...

And the fender lights or horns.........always disappear. It amazes me to see them still on a barn find. They never worked for long anyhow. Heck the first thing I did when I got a new bike that had wheel reflectors in the 70's was take them off and hang them on the wall in the garage...( I thought I was saving weight on my Schwinn...:rolleyes:)

It is inevitable that somewhere, after all the goodies have been stripped off and sold, there is a stripped frame awaiting its fate as a rat.
 
I've been thinking about this bike that Smoopy's posted up thread ~
6be4ed22dd6048ac96f88ae12a569d9d_zps4f8c-1.jpg


How did the DNA for a build like that end up in Tennessee ? It oozes Miami, Cuba or even Chula Vista So. Cal. Total Cuban/Dominican/TJ influences going on there.

Well at any rate, I dig it and I think it rates it's own theme song, like to hear it ? - here it goes ~

[video=youtube;YjAvQ22_05I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjAvQ22_05I[/video]

:cool:

pap
 
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As previously stated bikes in original condition may be best left as is or at most cleaned. Complete restorations are nice if you have the talent and means to do one. For some the rat or custom path satisfies the need to be creative. To me doing a rat rod provides an avenue to repurpose objects not necessarily bike related.
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yeah, who would want a rusty piece of trash like this anyway..I guess it was because it was fun to build and a change from the norm..this is mine:

6be4ed22dd6048ac96f88ae12a569d9d_zps4f8c-1.jpg

Well, yeah, that's pretty swell, but wouldn't that just attract girls, and girls are funny (Wally)? :p
 
I've been thinking about this bike that Smoopy's posted up thread ~

How did the DNA for a build like that end up in Tennessee ? It oozes Miami, Cuba or even Chula Vista So. Cal. Total Cuban/Dominican/TJ influences going on there.

Well at any rate, I dig it and I think it rates it's own theme song, like to hear it ? - here it goes ~

:cool:

pap

thanks for the comps bud and Tuco likes his new theme song..:D
 
I think you'll find it was as much about cheap and plentiful as it was about strength and craftsmanship... more accurate would be "Back in the late 70's a guy named Gary Fisher and his bros took old Schwinn prewar straight bar frames because they were cheap and plentiful and they were strong enough to take the beatings given them." other frames were used on the early clunkers, the Schwinn Straight bar was so commonly used because they were everywhere.

Totally agree with your tweak of wording, but also about the ratting led to mtn bikes. Same thing with race cars and just about anything else, take a stock product, strip and modify to suit the task you assign it.
 
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